Orchestral Association Goes to Plan B
The powers that be at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra have gone back to the drawing board and come up with an expansion plan to replace what now appears to be an unworkable proposal to buy the Borg-Warner building next door to Orchestra Hall. That plan, announced last summer, was to raze the Borg-Warner structure and erect a new one that would include office space, a recital hall, rehearsal facilities, a music library, and a cafe, among numerous other amenities. At an Orchestral Association trustee meeting last week, an alternate plan was presented that involves building an L-shaped structure behind Orchestra Hall on the southeast corner of Wabash and Adams. A CSO trustee present at last week’s board meeting said the new proposal would cost about the same as the Borg-Warner plan (just under $100 million including land acquisition) and encompass most if not all of the same elements. What would be missing in the new proposal, of course, is the more prestigious and imposing Michigan Avenue frontage. The new proposal would also require building through, or over, the alley that runs between Michigan and Wabash and would mean the view from the facility would be of the noisy Loop el tracks.
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International Theatre Fest News
Jane Nicholl Sahlins, executive director and cofounder of the biennial International Theatre Festival of Chicago, won’t be announcing the lineup for next spring’s program until mid or late January, but one item known to be on the agenda is the American premiere of a new play from Alan Ayckbourn. The working title is Communicating Doors; Ayckbourn wrote the first draft last fall. Sahlins has seen the script but so far has not shared it with anyone else around here, not even local producers who might be interested in picking it up for a commercial run after its limited engagement during the festival. Sahlins maintains she is under orders from Ayckbourn not to pass around the script. It will be given its first workshop performance next February at a theater Ayckbourn runs in Scarborough, a small town in the north of England, and Sahlins indicated that changes were likely to be made in the script based on that initial production. The prolific Ayckbourn’s most recent work, Time of My Life, was given its world premiere in London’s West End earlier in the fall, but it did not impress critics and the run lasted only a few weeks.
